Camping Gets Fancy Via Solar Power Concept

There are times when you just want to escape from your life. For that, there’s a Leav, a complex, many-leveled canvas structure that looks more like a Frank Lloyd Wright artifact than any tent you’ve ever seen. In fact, if Wright – the pioneer of organic architecture – were alive today, he’d probably be vacationing in a Leav.

Leav inventor Benjamin Charles, 27, currently a resident of Paris with a Masters in Industrial Design from L’école de Design Nantes Atlantique, created this extraordinarily cantilevered outdoor space to address the needs of the camping industry and campers, the latter of whom often find themselves in the middle of nowhere with no lighting except a campfire and a kerosene lantern once it gets dark.

In addition to solar photovoltaic-driven lighting, Charles’s Leav has solar thermal panels incorporated into the canvas to deliver hot water to the kitchen and bathroom (yes, this tent has both!). At the back of the tent, to offer more privacy to family members, are dry toilets, or composting toilets, those marvels of sanitary engineering which use little or no water and yet are odor-free.

The Leav, first conceived in 2008, aims for a totally sustainable vacation that will not harm whatever ecosphere you decide to visit. Over and above that, the Leav looks like something the U.S. military might snap up in its efforts to meet Energy for the Warfighter program goals which we reported on in March. Now, if some designer could incorporate Leav principles with the solar power-driven reverse osmosis water supply system (which we also wrote about in March), that would be huge!